634 quotes found
“I could not answer the ceaseless inward question-why I thus suffered; now, at the distance of-I will not say how many years, I see it clearly.”
“To toil, to think, to long, to grieve,—Is such my future fate?The morn was dreary, must the eveBe also desolate?”
“I replied that I did not quite know what my ailment had been, but that I had certainly suffered a good deal especially in mind. Further, on this subject, I did not consider it advisable to dwell, f...”
“This little man was of the order of beings who must not be opposed, unless you possessed an all-dominant force sufficient to crush him at once.”
“I looked, and had an acute pleasure in looking,--a precious yet poignant pleasure; pure gold, with a steely point of agony: a pleasure like what the thirst-perishing man might feel who knows the we...”
“Some of the best people that ever lived have been as destitute as I am; and if you are a Christian, you ought not to consider poverty a crime.”
“Poverty, for me, is synonymous with degradation.”
“If I let a gust of wind or a sprinkling of rain turn me aside from the easy tasks, what preparation would such sloth be for the future I propose myself?”
“Yet it would be your duty to bear it, if you could not avoid it: it is weak and silly to say you cannot bear what it is your fate to be required to bear.”
“I had wanted to compromise with Fate: to escape occasional great agonies by submitting to a whole life of privation and small pains.”
“He showed the fineness of his nature by being kinder to me after that misunderstanding than before. Nay, the very incident which, by my theory, must in some degree estrange me and him, changed, ind...”
“To pass its threshold was to return to stagnation; to cross the silent hall, to ascend the darksome staircase, to seek my own lonely little room, and then to meet tranquil Mrs. Fairfax, and spend t...”
“Then, learn from me not to judge by appearances: I am, as Miss Scatcherd said, slatternly; I seldom put, and never keep, things in order; I am careless; I forget rules; I read when I should learn m...”
“It is true I little respect women or girls who are loquacious either in boasting the triumphs, or bemoaning the mortifications, of feelings.”
“I tell you I must go!” I retorted, roused to something like passion. “Do you think I can stay to become nothing to you? Do you think I am an automaton?—a machine without feelings? and can bear to h...”
“My feelings towards it can only be paralleled by that of a doting parent towards an idiot child.”
“But if I feel, may I never express?” “Never!” declared Reason.I groaned under her bitter sternness. Never - never - oh, hard word! This hag, this Reason, would not let me look up, or smile, or hope...”
“Misery generates hate.”
“. . . they would neither hate nor envy us if they did not deem us so much happier than themselves.”
“Conventionality is not morality.”
